>Saying the words "women are more likely than men to do X" leaves the reader unfortunately with the impression "many women do X," whereas that might not be true.

I wonder if this is related to "X is better than Y." leading to "How dare you say X isn't bad!" I didn't, X can be extremely horrible, it can be the second most horrible thing to exist. The only qualifier I gave was that Y was at least one rank more horrible than X. If instead I had used "Y is worse than X" this likely wouldn't have happened.

I'm wondering if many people, when reading a relative comparison, imagine it in some absolute setting and then assume that was the intended information to convey. If your case they imagine a case where more women than men do X, meaning they imagine a whole lot of women doing X and very few men doing X, even though it could actually have been 2 of every million women vs 1 of every million men.

>>>Saying the words "women are more likely than men to do X" leaves the reader unfortunately with the impression "many women do X," whereas that might not be true.

Is there an accepted term for the extra caveat-ing and qualifying that people do with language these days to avoid the non-logical misinterpretations of factual statements by stupid people?

It's true that people don't have any idea about themselves, but I'm very skeptical you would get any better data by asking a different sex.

Just as much as people don't know themselves, they often know even less about others.

I think a much better way would be to ask the best friends of people to anonymously rate their friend and how they date. The best friend will be close enough to probably have a good idea. Obviously they like the person if they are friends (so there are biases here as well) but they might be more likely to notice patterns the person is otherwise oblivious to.

Sciences and scientists (quoting the terms used in the OP site) that publish statistics as bar charts in company blog post typically make it just a bit difficult to assess any quality at all. I simply would not even bother trying to interpret the data in its current form.

My wife and I read the book on love languages just prior to getting married. I don't think it's a scientific fact or anything, more like a well thought out linguistic tool for discussing feelings.

It simplified the process of learning each other's needs and communicating, and through time we've gotten better. I'd recommend it to anyone.

It's generally used as a starting point for discussing relationship needs. I put this under the flawed but useful category. Although it's really just another way to label yourself to others.

I don't see it as harmful but I'm sure we'll see more about it in the future as it has grown in popularity. Every woman in their 20s/30s I talk to has at one time mentioned it to me which was not the case until about 2 years ago.

I'm sure different cultures will have different ways of expressing affection thus leading to a different set of "Love Languages".

The term "validity" is thrown around a lot but there's no universal measure of psychometric validity. In simple terms, something is valid if it's predictive of something else that is useful (usually a behavior or another construct). There's plenty of studies that investigate the validity of love languages around things like marital satisfaction etc. More importantly, for the purposes of this study which is just based around self-reported preferences (and not psychometric properties), validity doesn't really matter. Reliability does, and there are is plenty of research around the reliability of these scales.

Personally I find it to be a useful model. It's not going to perfectly describe every relationship accurately. But I find it gives me an opportunity to be introspective about a relationship and my contributions to it, including my shortcomings.

Not everything needs to be scientifically rigorous to make a positive impact. Though I agree it's useful to keep in mind the limitations of a given description. MBTI is neat but making it part of a job application feels like a step too far.

Human behavior is flavored in the context of culture.

A western interpretation of love and the associated descriptions probably doesn’t apply to other cultures.

that's an interesting take, there is something very deflationary and depressing when one realizes ideals were inflated and unrealistic. Staying practical as a grounding mechanism, fascinating stuff.

I think love languages are good tool for getting on the same page 1:1 with a partner, but they're only marginally more useful than horoscopes. Things like "my partner really appreciates if I've got my arm around them while watching a movie" or "my partner appreciates if I get a pot of coffee going while they're in the shower" are good things to establish, and love languages are a good lens to establish them. But so many people want concise objective measures of who people are, and put way more weight on things than they deserve.

I agree, an INTP would usually be more analytical

>Responses are not necessarily indicative of how the respondents will actually behave in real life.

That's the case with any response anyone gives under almost all life contexts...

Honestly I find most studies based solely on self-reported data worthless.

What people say they’ll do/buy is often only loosely correlated with what actually happens.

See:

-YouTube thumbnail controversy, vs what people actually click on

-/r/apple and other comment section’s obsession with the commercially-failed mini lineup of iPhones

-everyone says ads don’t work on them, but ads work

I could go on

Yes we all know Apple users only care about one thing... the next I product /s

Would you date a non Apple user? Perhaps someone who doesn’t even have a phone?

I thought I had that desire most of my life and recently figured out that was far more about my major anxiety to be able to provide quality "service" (as the article calls it) in all relationships, from casual conversation to romantic. Obviously, there are still times I want to be alone, but I'm more aware if it's due to anxiety and try to deal with that feeling if it is. That's just what I figured out for myself, not trying to speak for anyone else.

You might be underappreciating genetic component here. Difference between sexes are very likely evolutionary, rather than social.

The OP says, under "Methodology notes":

> Non-binary and “other” genders are excluded from this study due to lack of sample size.

They haven't made this assumption, they've explicitly stated there was not sufficient data but acknowledged that other people not covered by the survey exist.

The app measures more than 2 genders but there's not enough sample to draw any conclusions.

Probably because intersexuality is so rare that there's not enough data.

All data is data, if you want more go find or acquire.

Because performing math on Infinity is really hard.

Or any other social institution for that matter: religion, newspapers, families, schools, sports, &c. Social institutions are fundamental or at the very least complicit in the legitimization of the social mechanisms of typification. That is to say, licensing the idea and practice that individual behavior can be simplified to types.

We all know the dangers of using oversimplified models in other contexts, but the same applies here and happens to be one of the largest generators of present conflict. It's a classic map-territory problem applied to people themselves and - whether the map makers know this or not - those who control the maps can sometimes also control the territory.

Right the point is that overall they are more the same than they are different.

> or how they perceive X.

Yes, giving identical labels to very different phenomena is a big problem in this kind of survey-based approach.

On Maggie McNeill's blog, one post touched on the idea that women want sex to last longer. She pointed out that women do frequently say this, but what they mean is that they want foreplay to last longer.

I don't think Tinder is any more an accurate way to evaluate how people love than this study.